Quelling Insurrection: Lethal Force, Human Rights and the Laws of War

This book re-examines the origins and development of the laws of war and human rights law and exposes an overlooked provision of the European Convention on Human Rights which permits the use of lethal force where absolutely necessary to quell an insurrection.

When civilian casualties occur in internal armed conflicts, questions are asked about how civilians can be better protected against the use of force by armed insurgents and state security forces. The laws of war include protection against the targeting of civilians but permit the use of force based on ’military necessity’ and allow ’proportionate’ civilian casualties. Where those laws do not apply, the use of force is generally seen as being limited to self-defence. This creates paradigms of armed conflict and law-enforcement with very different rules. The paradigms are then treated by governments and other actors as being separate and divided by a threshold of violence, when, in practice, they overlap, both in the conduct of military operations and, this book argues, as a matter of law.

Revisiting the law provides the opportunity to reassess the benefits and risks of the existing paradigms and consider how applying the provision permitting the use of lethal force in quelling an insurrection would affect them. The book concludes that it offers a middle way based on the existing law, but it requires wider recognition and development in order to achieve a more appropriate balance between human rights and collective security.

David Bicknell is Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London, UK.